Peter Schiff: Fire All the Government Economists

President Trump’s top economic advisor announced his resignation this week in the midst of a budding trade war.

Gary Cohn heads the National Economic Council. He was a “free trade” guy and generally opposed to high tariff policies. Most analysts think his resignation is a sign he lost the internal White House struggle over trade policy. Trump took the opportunity to promise he will replace Cohn with somebody “great.”

Cohn’s resignation gave Peter Schiff a different idea. Maybe we should just fire all of these government economists.

As Peter pointed out in his latest podcast, the president didn’t even have a council of economic advisors until after World War Two.

I think it’s a complete waste. I mean, America made it to 1946 without any economic advisors. And we had a much stronger economy, right? We went through the industrial revolution. We absorbed tens of millions of immigrants coming from all over the world. We had a massive expansion. We had a transformation from an agrarian to an industrial economy without any economic advice. The president didn’t talk to economists. There was no economist on the federal payroll.”

In effect, the economy ran itself. And as Peter said, that was the whole idea.

We don’t want the government micromanaging the economy. So, why do they need economists? What’s the point? This is not central planning. This isn’t the Soviet Union. We want a free market. We don’t want the government trying to figure out what the economy is going to do and then try to base policy on what they think is going to happen in the economy, on what they think will ‘help’ the economy. We want the government to be completely out of the economy.”

It’s not just the White House with economists on the payroll. Nearly every government agency has somebody on staff giving economic advice. And what has it gotten us? Trillions of dollars in debt.

We became the world’s wealthiest creditor nation with no economists  – zero economists. Now we’ve got all these economists and it’s a disaster. I mean, haven’t any of these economists noticed what a mess the US economy is? How massively the US economy has imploded? How we’ve gone from the biggest creditor to the biggest debtor?”

Peter said all of these economists aren’t really there to help. They are “yes men” intended to serve as ministers of propaganda for the government.

They’re not there to help the economy. They’re there to justify government policy by trying to pretend that this is about helping the economy, or trying to pretend that some new program or some new regulation is going to make the economy better. This is all cover. This is all a smokescreen for government to get bigger and bigger and to reach into your pocket to buy votes, to sustain their own fiefdom within the government.”

Peter is not one to identify a problem without offering a solution.

Personally, I think that everybody who works for the federal government that has the word economist in their title should just be fired. We don’t need them. It is a waste of money.  None of these guys really understands economics anyway. They all went to some liberal school and they learned all this Keynesian nonsense. They’re doing more harm than good. So, just get rid of them.”

Get Peter Schiff’s most important Gold headlines once per week – click here – for a free subscription to his exclusive weekly email updates.
Interested in learning how to buy gold and buy silver?
Call 1-888-GOLD-160 and speak with a Precious Metals Specialist today!